Shifting toward more personalized and proactive customer engagements

Many of us have been publicly predicting this shift for years, arguing that it all starts with the customer. It’s the customers who, through their behavior and through leveraging all the advantages of SaaS and cloud technologies, are making their preferences clear.

If you want me as a customer, you need to be able to understand how to provide me with what I need, at the moment I need it, in the way I prefer to receive it. If you can’t do that, I’ll just go somewhere else.

Many of us saw the changes in customer behavior coming well over a decade ago. We saw those changes emerging as great leaps in hardware technology expanded the availability, speed, and global connectivity of cloud architectures and applications became both increasingly portable and increasingly connectable. At the same time, the financial value argument for cloud versus on-premises data centers became more compelling. Application...